Peter the Renegade
by S. R. Crockett
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: EPISODE SIX – The Crowning Mercy.
Swearwords: None.
Description: EPISODE SIX – The Crowning Mercy.
Peter Blake, Scottish adventurer, late of the East India Company’s service, later still scout-master to His Majesty’s 4th Dragoons, has lost despatches and almost wrecked an army by one foolish drinking bout in the wine-cellars of a captured town. Sir John Moore is falling back to the sea. The French, under Soult, are following in overwhelming numbers. Peter, having only the gallows to expect, slips out between the armies and finds a new life as a Captain of Spanish guerrilla fighters. Angry at the death of two companions – renegades like himself – he starts off, greatly reinforced, to help the French to capture Moore at Corunna. But the sight of the red uniforms, and especially some of the words of a young officer – a fellow-countryman of his own – work a sudden conversion. To enable the British to hold out till the ships come, he captures the dangerous French batteries and destroys the guns. He has now set off all alone with Froyla to recover ten thousand pounds of the treasure abandoned by General Moore, with which he will buy the rights of the man who, by a family arrangement, must necessarily marry Froyla. They have been waiting among the mountains till the passes are clear of Soult’s army, now pouring southward out of Gallicia to oppose Sir Arthur Wellesley, whose landing is reported from Lisbon.
‘God!’ cried Wellington with a sudden outburst of anger, ‘this fellow embarrasses me. Shall we hang him or make him a General? First, he destroys the French artillery at Corunna. Then he brings important dispatches which carry us across Portugal and all the Spains. Now he saves my life. What the devil can we do with such a fellow?’
The carrion crows were gathered together. They had scented the battle from afar, and amid the acrid stench of blood and the lust of plunder they filled the air with the flapping of their wings.
The twelve original foreign recruits of the Molinos band had by Peter’s pruning become a scant four. Now two only were camped together on the bleak Sierra di Hermanos, overlooking Pampeluña. It was the day after the first battle of the Pyrenees, and down there the ravens and vultures were still picking the bones.
But O’Hanlon and Kinstrey were superior birds of prey. They had made their rounds as soon as night fell, in spite of the danger of the British fatigue parties and ambulance men, patrols and reconnaissances, which still furrowed that stricken field in all directions.
Such men as O’Hanlon and Kinstrey had but one watchword:
‘Stop the mouth of him afore he squeals!’
Then there were watches and purses, perhaps a locket with a coil of hair (at which Kinstrey laughed his most sinister snigger), or a roll of bank-notes sewed in a waistcoat and betrayed by their crackling. These two got the best, and in their own eyes they deserved it. For the risks were great – indeed, immense. English, French or Spanish, no one would give them a moment’s quarter. They would not have dreamed of asking it, but when cornered have fought to the last snap and snarl like the wolves they were.
Yet, what is strange to think upon, thirty years before they had been a pair of bare-legged, freckled and tanned little fisher brats making sand castles, digging bait, fishing for saithe and hooking lobsters among the rocks of Killibegs, where the Atlantic eternally batters the nose of County Donegal.
Now they were just plain wolves taking counsel together. O’Hanlon – the superior fiend – if any superiority can exist where all have fallen so low – still asserted his leadership by a certain care for his person, a carefully shaven chin and a uniform coat of some gay French lance regiment, mended at collar and wrist. He wore a fur-lined waistcoat with immense pockets, the loot of a dead sutler, and his knee-breeches were of large plaided material. Over these his hose were pulled high, and his feet were thrust into a pair of espadrillas, the ‘alpargatas’ of the East, than which no more noiseless footgear exists.
‘Clocks and snippets of jewellery are all very well,’ said Kinstrey, a weasel-faced little man with carroty hair of the startling tint which in County Donegal goes with abundant freckles and china blue eyes. ‘But how are we to get rid of them in this damned country? Every honest man who buys the like shows you piles just the same and offers you three halfpence for the lot. He does not want such things, he swears. Look you, how is he to sell all these?
‘Bah!’ said O’Hanlon, puffing contentedly on his pipe; ‘he can sell or he would not have bought.’
‘Very true,’ answered the flame-headed man with a sneer, ‘but we are as far off as ever from that fortune you are for ever talking about. I want enough to buy me mother’s cow run at Killibegs, and the four fields at the back that will come to be sold when the old Steve Moriarty turns up his toes; and that can’t be long now. He is over ninety, the craitur!’
The caressing amble of the West Irish accent could not be mistaken. It fell soft as peat fresh cut from the bog, or wool carded ready for the great spinning wheels which fill Donegal upon winter evenings with the saddest sound in the world - the whoo-whoo-a of the women going backwards and forwards while the wind wails in the chimney of the cabin, mightily cheerful by contrast.
Who shall say that all that music – the days of rain, soft and implacable, from the Atlantic, the stormy nights with inexplicable lulls and sudden brutal gusts – did not remain fresh in the mind of those bad men who had played as boys about the rocks of Killibegs?
O’Hanlon regarded his inferior scornfully.
‘’Tis great science now, ye will be having in the head of ye, Tim Kinstrey,’ he spat as he mouthed the words as if a Protestant had passed that way; ‘you to be speaking to me about plans and strategies, you that never had the invention of a louse in a beggar’s bonnet. And yet while you are counting trinkets and winding watches, I have this!’
And he thrust a large sheet of official letter-post paper under his companion’s nose.
‘Read – read!’ he commanded authoritatively. The other drew away as from an evil odour, so near had come the fist which could have felled an ox.
‘If I had been let stop steady wid ould Terence Kernan at the hedge school, as you were, I might. But as ye well know, me father always needed me to mind the still, or keep the cows, or do a message in the town. Read I cannot – write I cannot, and well do ye know it Michael avick!’
‘Well, then, will ye listen to them that can?’ thundered O’Hanlon.
‘I can listen,’ grumbled Kinstrey, ‘God knows my ears have grown long enough wid staying alongside o’ you, Michael O’Hanlon!’
‘Five thousand napoleons in gold to the man who rids us of my Lord Wellington!’
‘If the job is worth five, thinks I, ‘tis worth ten. So I said as much plainly to the man who brought me the message.’
‘And who might he be?’ his companion inquired.
‘Count your trinkets and wind your watches,’ sneered O’Hanlon, frowning with black brows suddenly levelled like a file of muskets brought to the present.
‘I was only asking,’ said Kinstrey, suddenly humble.
‘And I’ll tell ye no lies!’ retorted O’Hanlon savagely. ‘Ten thousand gold pieces I asked for the job, and ten thousand I will get, when I can present them with the burial certificated of my countryman and the pride av the Brrritish arrrmy!’
‘Humph!’ snarled Kinstrey; ‘they will deny ye, corpse and all. Is it likely now that colonels and generals – for I expect they are the cattle in the service of the Emperor of all the French – would have anny tokin’s wid the likes of you?’
O’Hanlon brought his hand heavily upon his knee.
‘I have it wrote out in the Emperor’s own hand: The day after my Lord Wellington’s death, let the man have the reward agreed upon. NAPOLEON.’
The order was genuine. There the Corsican had spoken. He could be generous towards those whom he conquered, especially if, as in the case of Poland, some fair country-woman spoke for them. But such was his hatred of Wellington that he left a thousand pounds in his will to the man who should assassinate the victor of Waterloo.
Kinstrey said no more. He moved uneasily, however, as one who would speak if he dared, and blew off the large snowflakes which, like white butterflies, poised themselves before alighting on his hands.
He was angry with himself for being there; angry with O’Hanlon for keeping him out on a bleak hillside among the Pyrenees when he might be cosy by a turf fire, a double gill of usquebaugh by his side and his pipe alight, in a well-thatched cabin in Donegal, with the roar of the Holy Sea of Killibegs filling his ears, like the drone of the people chanting in chapel of a Sunday.
My Lord Wellington was proverbially careless of his person. He would often answer the supplications of his officers who besought him to retire to a less exposed position with the words:
‘Gentlemen, I must see. If I do not see, I might as well command the Army of the Peninsula from a stool in Whitehall, and of that we have had enough already.’
On several occasions the French cavalry, by a clever dash, almost cut off Wellington and his whole staff. They had to fling themselves upon their horses and gallop for their lives.
Never was his determination to see everything more to the front than during the final winter campaign in the Pyrenees. Wellington exposed himself among those wild mountains, where every hillside bristled with sharpshooters, as if, as a staff sergeant said, ‘the ould man had been the umpire at a sham fight.’ When a man was ordered to go on the Commander-in-Chief’s staff he made his will and prepared letters to his weeping relations.
The French officers to whom Napoleon’s order had been transmitted were not those of the highest rank – a Paymaster General, a Colonel of Chasseurs whom the Emperor had already employed at the time of the proposed invasion of England in 1802, and Voyer-Bertrand, one of the men who hung about every army commanded by a Marshal of Napoleon’s, nominally on staff duty or in charge of the hospitals, but really acting as spies upon the Commander-in-Chief and his Generals of Brigade. These men were known throughout the armies as mouchards-en-gros. The death-rate was accordingly heavy among them, and they well deserved their pay. Most died from wounds in the back received during action, or were quietly killed in their bivouacs by gun shots fired through the tent wall.
But those who survived had great rewards, and at any rate a strong Marshal like Massena or Soult cared little for such cattle. Let the rascal write as he liked. Their master could not do without them, in any case.
‘See now, Jaimsie,’ said O’Hanlon, ‘this is how we will bait the trap. Me Lord Wellington wad not be likely to come where he would be us use to us, supposin’ that we sent him a letter signed Mike O’Hanlon and Jaimsie Kinstrey! No, he would send a wasp’s nest of blasted Spaniards after us with a general order ‘to be shot wherever found’. And that would be the end of one of the most promising combinations ever imagined by the fertile brain of a Killibegs boy. But hark now, Jaimsie. Ye remember that renegadin’ rascal of a Scot that called himself a partida?’
‘Aye, Peter Blake. He strook me, Crommle’s curse on him!’ growled Kinstrey, pulling at his red whiskers.
‘That same, Jaimsie. Do not curse him, ‘tis too great trouble. We shall make him curse himself. He has risen high since our time, me son, wears colonel’s uniform, no less, and calls himself Intelligence Officer. Have ye a bit av his hand o’ write about you, now, Jaimsie? ‘Tis not to be expected, but ye might.’
‘Devil a spit. How should I read it if I had?’
‘Ye could not, Jaimsie; but I could – aye, and write it too. But since we have not, we must just run our chance. ’Tis not likely our grrand officher Peter will have made many reports in writing. If intelligence is what he is after, he would trust nothing to paper, but go to headquarters himself. That’s what kaping in touch means, me son – credit and the money down, according to the value of the article. But you, Jaimsie, will watch till Peter is well off among these accursed mountains wid all his cavalcade at his heel, and then I will send what I have written by a sure hand, which will bring my Lord Arthur within four paces of our two rifles. He will be on a bridge, a Spanish bridge, his horse stepping gingerly, and we could not miss him if we tried.’
‘And what about getting away after?’ demanded Kinstrey.
‘Oh, I know the spot, Jaimsie. I am not talkin’ through me hat as a Tyrone man might, but as wan Donegal man to another. We have only to turn to be deep in the wood among rocks and precipices where no cavalryman could follow us. Moreover, there will be only grand big feathered officers there, and what wid my Lord Arthur gasping there wid two big holes in him, and the fear of the like from the same quarter, you and me, Jaimsie, will be safe as in our beds. Then we shall go to the French paymaster to touch the gold napoleons, and so home to Killibegs to live next door in two cottages on the beach, each with a bouncing Donegal lass for a wife, shell walks in the gardens, the figure-head of the Bridget or Good Intent looking through the green railings, and Father McFadden bidding us good-day at the gate, an’ hopin’ that he will have the happiness of seeing us regular at chapel!’
It was in the gently sloping green rectangle at the mouth of the Val Carlos, through which the waters of the mountain torrents are led to the flour and meal mills of Arneguy, that O’Hanlon had established his trap. The canal cut the turf halfway down, was crossed by a little mossy bridge without parapets, covered thickly with short grass on which the hill sheep were wont to graze, and where, looking over, they could see their horns and great wild eyes mirrored in the placid water. This was the path by which Wellington must come to the rendezvous – that is to say, if he came at all. And to ensure this O’Hanlon had devised a most cunningly laid snare.
He had written: My Lord, – I am at present with some Spanish levies in the camp of Marshal Soult. I am, therefore, prevented from coming to your Lordship’s headquarters. I have important news for your private ear. If your Lordship places sufficient confidence in me, let him come to the mill bridge at the Arneguy end of the Val Carlos canal, during the afternoon of Sunday, and I shall lay the matter before you. PETER BLAKE.
O’Hanlon dared not risk himself to add Peter’s rank and service. He had indeed seen the Colonel’s insignia as Peter passed in a cloud of dust with his faithful two-and-twenty, and he had heard it said that El Gran’ Lor’ had made him an Intelligence Officer.
But though his pen was lifted to write, he withheld himself. He dared not make a mistake which might spoil all.
The message was carried to the British outposts by Roderigués the hunchback, a sort of mountain carry-all, well known in all the camps, and meantime O’Hanlon and Kinstrey repaired to the wood of Rio Carlos, which ran down to the valley in a tongue of dense green pines. There all day axe and pickaxe rested not, and by eventide O’Hanlon was satisfied with his work. Two loopholes in the breastwork completely screened by brushwood commanded the low green arch of the bridge, while all manner of intricate interlacings and stretched cord, such as poachers use, prevented pursuit to right and left. O’Hanlon and Kinstrey, the black and the red Celt, would be in good hiding long before any force could be launched on their tracks.
But they had reckoned without Peter and his twenty-two. Peter never left his own lines of communication unwatched, and when little Elsa Feliçé, a promising postulant of fifteen, brought him word that two men were scouting about the mill lade of Val Carlos, he instantly put back his negotiation with Count Leon and set off to see for himself what was happening nearer home.
Peter was an Intelligence Officer, also, as he said, a colonel in partibus, and what an Intelligence Officer made Peter! Not an enemy’s corporal’s guard moved a stone’s throw without his knowledge, and what Peter knew my Lord Wellington knew within the hour. At first Froyla made an equally incomparable lieutenant, but of late she had begun to busy herself with the beautiful little house, all stone walls and miradors, wooden balconies and wide verandahs, which was being built on the hill above the river of La Giralda. She was a loss to the command, for not only had she great influence among the twenty-two, but she spoke with facility the marvellously inflected speech of the Basques – her mother had been of the blood of Guipuzcoa, and at the siege of Pampeluña she had been of constant use, translating messages and interpreting the reports of peasants and spies.
Of late, however, she had grown curiously shy of camps and the bivouacs of men, and had contented herself with bustling the workmen from Ludo and the coast villages who, as in common with their kind, dragged out their task as long as possible.
She looked hourly for a messenger from her husband. She was always expecting him, or at least a brief scrawled note from his order-book telling of his doings. But mostly she was content to stay within doors and receive the counsels and congratulations of her father and Don Juan Julio, who came daily up the slopes together to judge of the progress of the work. They shook their heads over the extravagance of the miradors (glass enclosed balconies) on every storey, ‘like a house in Victoria,’ as they said, approved the depth and shade of the verandahs, and the wind-screens which slid so easily upon unseen wheels. Their old bones would find kindly shelter there on windy days when they could ‘drink the sun’ nowhere else.
The great pinewood of the Rio Carlos which swept across the valley immediately below the green canal bridge was a wilderness of tall reeds, rusty ferns, and last year’s climbing vines. But at certain hours of the morning the sunlight sifted it through and through, glorifying everything. The pools of the poor despoiled river beneath glittered among arid wastes of stones, but the canal pushed calmly forward, a pleasant six foot breadth of green water sluicing placidly towards the mill wheels in the valley below.
Upon this restricted space, looking no bigger than an unfolded handkerchief threaded by the green serpent of the mill canal, Peter and his men looked down from a point of rock called Puerto Marguerita, the Gate of the Pearl. Beneath them, and four hundred yards away, dense brakes of bramble and fern, all pale turquoise and orange with the frosts of late autumn, hid the despoiled watercourses. All was bathed in a gracious and unreal opaline haze which rendered every object marvellously clear and lucid.
Peter and his band were struck with amazement at the changes which had been made behind the barricade of creepers and underbrush on the edge of the wood. They saw clearly, as on a map the felled trees, the intricate entanglements, the woven brushwood, the deadly openings in front, to right and left of the bridge, which were to receive gun barrels.
They also saw, very small and black, creeping hither and thither like abominable insects, the foreshortened figures of the two men in waiting. It was too far to distinguish features, but Peter recognised the jerky, disjoined movements of O’Hanlon, and the square scarabæic figure of Kinstrey, squatting toad-like at his loophole, patient as a spider among the cords of his web.
Before the party on the rock above the Val Carlos had time to change position a little cloud of mounted men was seen approaching along the highway from Pampeluña. The tall spare man with the cocked hat and white plume driven well down over his brows paused to consult a map. With a crook of the finger he summoned an officer to assist him. They consulted the chart together, verifying their position by pencil and compass. Then half a dozen men dismounted and knocked down half a dozen paces of mortarless stone wall, through which the cavalcade poured itself out upon the pleasant green sward of the canal pasture.
‘My God!’ exclaimed Peter hoarsely, as the plot flashed upon him, ‘the devils are waiting to murder the General! Give me my rifle.’
Even in Spain, where the thing is common, the word murder has an ugly sound. The twenty-two clustered closer about, and those who had rifles looked well to the priming. There was no order to fire. There would be none. Peter, and he alone, could pick off these two men before the tall man on the chestnut mare should ride opposite the muzzles of their guns over the low green arch of the canal bridge.
They were so near, it seemed to the eager watchers above that they could have pushed their victim with the muzzles of their pieces.
A tremulousness crept over the band. They could see the heads of the men in ambush go down. The tall man, whom they knew to be El Gran’ Lor’, the hope of Spain, rode nearer down the slope. In another minute he would be passing those deadly muzzles. Could nothing stop them? They saw their captain take a long breath, nestle the butt of his rifle against his cheek as if he loved it, and slowly depress the muzzle. It was not his habit to hang upon his shot, but now the waiting seemed interminable.
The feet of the General’s horse had touched the bridge, and the men’s heads bent towards the quarry.
With a jerk of all their nerves the twenty-two heard Peter’s shot ring out. He threw up the smoking barrel and instantly a second rifle was passed to him. The reek cleared in time for them to see O’Hanlon fallen flat on his face, his musket cocked harmlessly in the air, and his face between his hands.
But to him Peter paid no attention whatever. All his power of vision was concentrated on the shorter man, who had raised himself on one elbow and was looking back over his shoulder, meditating flight. But the General, riding fifty yards ahead, was now on the bridge, and the second villain, doubtless thinking of the great reward, bent again towards the loophole.
‘Crack!’ went Peter’s second shot. Kinstrey threw up his arms, his gun exploding harmlessly among the cord entanglements. Wellington rode straight at the bulwark of fallen trees, leaped his horse over the barricade, and stood gazing with astonishment at the two men, one dying, the other dead.’
The riddle was, however, easy enough to read. The breastwork, the loopholes, the cords to trip the horses were clear evidence of treachery, and the fluttering signals from above showed from which direction help had come.
Presently Peter came down and saluted with his usual grave decorum.
‘You fired those shots?’ said Wellington, almost in a tone of reprimand. He hated to be indebted to anyone, which always gave him an air of ill-humour when acknowledging favours face to face. On paper and in all reports, written and oral, no man was ever more ready to do justice to every subordinate.
‘I hit this second man a little too high,’ said Peter, touching Kinstrey with his foot, ‘but he was bending to the loophole, and I dared not hang upon the trigger.’
He noticed the mouth of Wellington’s horse bleeding. A bullet had glanced from the bridle, making a slight furrow on the cheek to the corner of the mouth.
‘The fellow came nearer than I had thought,’ Peter meditated, as Busaco, impatient of a stranger’s touch, tossed his noble head, which the frivolous declared grew more and more like that of his master every day.
‘God!’ cried Wellington, with a sudden outburst of anger, ‘this fellow embarrasses me. Shall we hang him or make him General? First, he destroys the French artillery at Corunna. Then he brings important dispatches which carry us across Portugal and all the Spains. Now he saves my life. What the devil can we do with such a fellow?’
‘Make him a General, as you say, your Excellency,’ suggested Ponsonby. ‘Cameron died this morning and the Anglo-Portuguese will follow this fellow anywhere.’
Wellington rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
‘What education have you?’ he jerked out, frowning his brows as if he were about to condemn Peter to death.
‘The best a man can have,’ quoth Peter: ‘Master of Arts of Edinburgh University.’
‘And how came you to be fighting like the devil all over the face of the earth from the Deccan to the Pyrenees?’
‘Indeed I don’t know,’ said Peter, ‘unless, like your Excellency, I had a taste for the job.’
Wellington laughed, and tapping him on the shoulder, ordered him to be off and take in hand Cameron’s brigade of Anglo-Portuguese.
‘Nippy little chaps they are, I understand, and need some leading; but you speak their language and your little band there can act as gallopers. Off with you and take hold! Ponsonby will give you a send off.’
Behold Peter installed as acting general of brigade! Pack was wounded, Crittenden dead. Only Campbell remained to help him with the useful fighting contingent which Wellington had made out of the Portuguese troops.
‘Good soldiers,’ approved Campbell, a red-bearded Highlander: ‘no Cortez, no numskull Spanish generals. Good big man (that’s you or me) says ‘Do this!’ Good little man smelling of garlic goes and does it without any question. Ever commanded a brigade before?’
‘Mostly Intelligence Department,’ said Peter, carefully picking his words, ‘but in India I took a command when it came my way. Here I have mostly been with the Spaniards – free companies and Romana’s army, which always does its best to fight another day. My fellows did not quite run away. They plundered. But I own a village up there to the north-west, and these twenty-two of my own people stick as close as any man could wish. I do not know what the Portuguese will say to them.’
‘Why, make them your personal escort. Give the stripes and the gold lace to the little ginger-coloured Dons, and you are all right.’
And now we have Peter general of the brigade, cloaked and cock-hatted at the expense of the British Government! The Bidassoa has been crossed. The last battle on Spanish soil fought. Before them Soult was sullenly retiring, fighting, as always, an excellent rearguard action. Bayonne, Toulouse were before him – Paris, triumph!
They halted awhile in the height of the last mountain pass, the great commander and Peter watching the slow passage of the troops across the Bidassoa.
‘Come with us,’ said Wellington; ‘there is good warm work ahead. We have got at the giant’s feet of clay at last. We will put you on the English Army List, and ‘Sir Peter’ will go very well with an estate – they tell me you are rich.’
‘I thank you, my Lord,’ said Peter very quietly, ‘but I have a little house and a village up there and in that house there is a wife – and the sound of a young child crying.’
‘Tut–tut!’ exclaimed Wellington explosively, and, wheeling, he set Busaco’s nose in the direction of the ford.
‘Dam sentimental Scotchman!’ grumbled the Chief. ‘Glad I was never taken that way. Where should I have been if I had?
But Peter was already a dim figure riding slowly up the misty pass, away from titles and honours, but every moment nearer to love and the crying of the young child whom he had never seen.
‘God!’ cried Wellington with a sudden outburst of anger, ‘this fellow embarrasses me. Shall we hang him or make him a General? First, he destroys the French artillery at Corunna. Then he brings important dispatches which carry us across Portugal and all the Spains. Now he saves my life. What the devil can we do with such a fellow?’
The carrion crows were gathered together. They had scented the battle from afar, and amid the acrid stench of blood and the lust of plunder they filled the air with the flapping of their wings.
The twelve original foreign recruits of the Molinos band had by Peter’s pruning become a scant four. Now two only were camped together on the bleak Sierra di Hermanos, overlooking Pampeluña. It was the day after the first battle of the Pyrenees, and down there the ravens and vultures were still picking the bones.
But O’Hanlon and Kinstrey were superior birds of prey. They had made their rounds as soon as night fell, in spite of the danger of the British fatigue parties and ambulance men, patrols and reconnaissances, which still furrowed that stricken field in all directions.
Such men as O’Hanlon and Kinstrey had but one watchword:
‘Stop the mouth of him afore he squeals!’
Then there were watches and purses, perhaps a locket with a coil of hair (at which Kinstrey laughed his most sinister snigger), or a roll of bank-notes sewed in a waistcoat and betrayed by their crackling. These two got the best, and in their own eyes they deserved it. For the risks were great – indeed, immense. English, French or Spanish, no one would give them a moment’s quarter. They would not have dreamed of asking it, but when cornered have fought to the last snap and snarl like the wolves they were.
Yet, what is strange to think upon, thirty years before they had been a pair of bare-legged, freckled and tanned little fisher brats making sand castles, digging bait, fishing for saithe and hooking lobsters among the rocks of Killibegs, where the Atlantic eternally batters the nose of County Donegal.
Now they were just plain wolves taking counsel together. O’Hanlon – the superior fiend – if any superiority can exist where all have fallen so low – still asserted his leadership by a certain care for his person, a carefully shaven chin and a uniform coat of some gay French lance regiment, mended at collar and wrist. He wore a fur-lined waistcoat with immense pockets, the loot of a dead sutler, and his knee-breeches were of large plaided material. Over these his hose were pulled high, and his feet were thrust into a pair of espadrillas, the ‘alpargatas’ of the East, than which no more noiseless footgear exists.
‘Clocks and snippets of jewellery are all very well,’ said Kinstrey, a weasel-faced little man with carroty hair of the startling tint which in County Donegal goes with abundant freckles and china blue eyes. ‘But how are we to get rid of them in this damned country? Every honest man who buys the like shows you piles just the same and offers you three halfpence for the lot. He does not want such things, he swears. Look you, how is he to sell all these?
‘Bah!’ said O’Hanlon, puffing contentedly on his pipe; ‘he can sell or he would not have bought.’
‘Very true,’ answered the flame-headed man with a sneer, ‘but we are as far off as ever from that fortune you are for ever talking about. I want enough to buy me mother’s cow run at Killibegs, and the four fields at the back that will come to be sold when the old Steve Moriarty turns up his toes; and that can’t be long now. He is over ninety, the craitur!’
The caressing amble of the West Irish accent could not be mistaken. It fell soft as peat fresh cut from the bog, or wool carded ready for the great spinning wheels which fill Donegal upon winter evenings with the saddest sound in the world - the whoo-whoo-a of the women going backwards and forwards while the wind wails in the chimney of the cabin, mightily cheerful by contrast.
Who shall say that all that music – the days of rain, soft and implacable, from the Atlantic, the stormy nights with inexplicable lulls and sudden brutal gusts – did not remain fresh in the mind of those bad men who had played as boys about the rocks of Killibegs?
O’Hanlon regarded his inferior scornfully.
‘’Tis great science now, ye will be having in the head of ye, Tim Kinstrey,’ he spat as he mouthed the words as if a Protestant had passed that way; ‘you to be speaking to me about plans and strategies, you that never had the invention of a louse in a beggar’s bonnet. And yet while you are counting trinkets and winding watches, I have this!’
And he thrust a large sheet of official letter-post paper under his companion’s nose.
‘Read – read!’ he commanded authoritatively. The other drew away as from an evil odour, so near had come the fist which could have felled an ox.
‘If I had been let stop steady wid ould Terence Kernan at the hedge school, as you were, I might. But as ye well know, me father always needed me to mind the still, or keep the cows, or do a message in the town. Read I cannot – write I cannot, and well do ye know it Michael avick!’
‘Well, then, will ye listen to them that can?’ thundered O’Hanlon.
‘I can listen,’ grumbled Kinstrey, ‘God knows my ears have grown long enough wid staying alongside o’ you, Michael O’Hanlon!’
‘Five thousand napoleons in gold to the man who rids us of my Lord Wellington!’
‘If the job is worth five, thinks I, ‘tis worth ten. So I said as much plainly to the man who brought me the message.’
‘And who might he be?’ his companion inquired.
‘Count your trinkets and wind your watches,’ sneered O’Hanlon, frowning with black brows suddenly levelled like a file of muskets brought to the present.
‘I was only asking,’ said Kinstrey, suddenly humble.
‘And I’ll tell ye no lies!’ retorted O’Hanlon savagely. ‘Ten thousand gold pieces I asked for the job, and ten thousand I will get, when I can present them with the burial certificated of my countryman and the pride av the Brrritish arrrmy!’
‘Humph!’ snarled Kinstrey; ‘they will deny ye, corpse and all. Is it likely now that colonels and generals – for I expect they are the cattle in the service of the Emperor of all the French – would have anny tokin’s wid the likes of you?’
O’Hanlon brought his hand heavily upon his knee.
‘I have it wrote out in the Emperor’s own hand: The day after my Lord Wellington’s death, let the man have the reward agreed upon. NAPOLEON.’
The order was genuine. There the Corsican had spoken. He could be generous towards those whom he conquered, especially if, as in the case of Poland, some fair country-woman spoke for them. But such was his hatred of Wellington that he left a thousand pounds in his will to the man who should assassinate the victor of Waterloo.
Kinstrey said no more. He moved uneasily, however, as one who would speak if he dared, and blew off the large snowflakes which, like white butterflies, poised themselves before alighting on his hands.
He was angry with himself for being there; angry with O’Hanlon for keeping him out on a bleak hillside among the Pyrenees when he might be cosy by a turf fire, a double gill of usquebaugh by his side and his pipe alight, in a well-thatched cabin in Donegal, with the roar of the Holy Sea of Killibegs filling his ears, like the drone of the people chanting in chapel of a Sunday.
My Lord Wellington was proverbially careless of his person. He would often answer the supplications of his officers who besought him to retire to a less exposed position with the words:
‘Gentlemen, I must see. If I do not see, I might as well command the Army of the Peninsula from a stool in Whitehall, and of that we have had enough already.’
On several occasions the French cavalry, by a clever dash, almost cut off Wellington and his whole staff. They had to fling themselves upon their horses and gallop for their lives.
Never was his determination to see everything more to the front than during the final winter campaign in the Pyrenees. Wellington exposed himself among those wild mountains, where every hillside bristled with sharpshooters, as if, as a staff sergeant said, ‘the ould man had been the umpire at a sham fight.’ When a man was ordered to go on the Commander-in-Chief’s staff he made his will and prepared letters to his weeping relations.
The French officers to whom Napoleon’s order had been transmitted were not those of the highest rank – a Paymaster General, a Colonel of Chasseurs whom the Emperor had already employed at the time of the proposed invasion of England in 1802, and Voyer-Bertrand, one of the men who hung about every army commanded by a Marshal of Napoleon’s, nominally on staff duty or in charge of the hospitals, but really acting as spies upon the Commander-in-Chief and his Generals of Brigade. These men were known throughout the armies as mouchards-en-gros. The death-rate was accordingly heavy among them, and they well deserved their pay. Most died from wounds in the back received during action, or were quietly killed in their bivouacs by gun shots fired through the tent wall.
But those who survived had great rewards, and at any rate a strong Marshal like Massena or Soult cared little for such cattle. Let the rascal write as he liked. Their master could not do without them, in any case.
‘See now, Jaimsie,’ said O’Hanlon, ‘this is how we will bait the trap. Me Lord Wellington wad not be likely to come where he would be us use to us, supposin’ that we sent him a letter signed Mike O’Hanlon and Jaimsie Kinstrey! No, he would send a wasp’s nest of blasted Spaniards after us with a general order ‘to be shot wherever found’. And that would be the end of one of the most promising combinations ever imagined by the fertile brain of a Killibegs boy. But hark now, Jaimsie. Ye remember that renegadin’ rascal of a Scot that called himself a partida?’
‘Aye, Peter Blake. He strook me, Crommle’s curse on him!’ growled Kinstrey, pulling at his red whiskers.
‘That same, Jaimsie. Do not curse him, ‘tis too great trouble. We shall make him curse himself. He has risen high since our time, me son, wears colonel’s uniform, no less, and calls himself Intelligence Officer. Have ye a bit av his hand o’ write about you, now, Jaimsie? ‘Tis not to be expected, but ye might.’
‘Devil a spit. How should I read it if I had?’
‘Ye could not, Jaimsie; but I could – aye, and write it too. But since we have not, we must just run our chance. ’Tis not likely our grrand officher Peter will have made many reports in writing. If intelligence is what he is after, he would trust nothing to paper, but go to headquarters himself. That’s what kaping in touch means, me son – credit and the money down, according to the value of the article. But you, Jaimsie, will watch till Peter is well off among these accursed mountains wid all his cavalcade at his heel, and then I will send what I have written by a sure hand, which will bring my Lord Arthur within four paces of our two rifles. He will be on a bridge, a Spanish bridge, his horse stepping gingerly, and we could not miss him if we tried.’
‘And what about getting away after?’ demanded Kinstrey.
‘Oh, I know the spot, Jaimsie. I am not talkin’ through me hat as a Tyrone man might, but as wan Donegal man to another. We have only to turn to be deep in the wood among rocks and precipices where no cavalryman could follow us. Moreover, there will be only grand big feathered officers there, and what wid my Lord Arthur gasping there wid two big holes in him, and the fear of the like from the same quarter, you and me, Jaimsie, will be safe as in our beds. Then we shall go to the French paymaster to touch the gold napoleons, and so home to Killibegs to live next door in two cottages on the beach, each with a bouncing Donegal lass for a wife, shell walks in the gardens, the figure-head of the Bridget or Good Intent looking through the green railings, and Father McFadden bidding us good-day at the gate, an’ hopin’ that he will have the happiness of seeing us regular at chapel!’
It was in the gently sloping green rectangle at the mouth of the Val Carlos, through which the waters of the mountain torrents are led to the flour and meal mills of Arneguy, that O’Hanlon had established his trap. The canal cut the turf halfway down, was crossed by a little mossy bridge without parapets, covered thickly with short grass on which the hill sheep were wont to graze, and where, looking over, they could see their horns and great wild eyes mirrored in the placid water. This was the path by which Wellington must come to the rendezvous – that is to say, if he came at all. And to ensure this O’Hanlon had devised a most cunningly laid snare.
He had written: My Lord, – I am at present with some Spanish levies in the camp of Marshal Soult. I am, therefore, prevented from coming to your Lordship’s headquarters. I have important news for your private ear. If your Lordship places sufficient confidence in me, let him come to the mill bridge at the Arneguy end of the Val Carlos canal, during the afternoon of Sunday, and I shall lay the matter before you. PETER BLAKE.
O’Hanlon dared not risk himself to add Peter’s rank and service. He had indeed seen the Colonel’s insignia as Peter passed in a cloud of dust with his faithful two-and-twenty, and he had heard it said that El Gran’ Lor’ had made him an Intelligence Officer.
But though his pen was lifted to write, he withheld himself. He dared not make a mistake which might spoil all.
The message was carried to the British outposts by Roderigués the hunchback, a sort of mountain carry-all, well known in all the camps, and meantime O’Hanlon and Kinstrey repaired to the wood of Rio Carlos, which ran down to the valley in a tongue of dense green pines. There all day axe and pickaxe rested not, and by eventide O’Hanlon was satisfied with his work. Two loopholes in the breastwork completely screened by brushwood commanded the low green arch of the bridge, while all manner of intricate interlacings and stretched cord, such as poachers use, prevented pursuit to right and left. O’Hanlon and Kinstrey, the black and the red Celt, would be in good hiding long before any force could be launched on their tracks.
But they had reckoned without Peter and his twenty-two. Peter never left his own lines of communication unwatched, and when little Elsa Feliçé, a promising postulant of fifteen, brought him word that two men were scouting about the mill lade of Val Carlos, he instantly put back his negotiation with Count Leon and set off to see for himself what was happening nearer home.
Peter was an Intelligence Officer, also, as he said, a colonel in partibus, and what an Intelligence Officer made Peter! Not an enemy’s corporal’s guard moved a stone’s throw without his knowledge, and what Peter knew my Lord Wellington knew within the hour. At first Froyla made an equally incomparable lieutenant, but of late she had begun to busy herself with the beautiful little house, all stone walls and miradors, wooden balconies and wide verandahs, which was being built on the hill above the river of La Giralda. She was a loss to the command, for not only had she great influence among the twenty-two, but she spoke with facility the marvellously inflected speech of the Basques – her mother had been of the blood of Guipuzcoa, and at the siege of Pampeluña she had been of constant use, translating messages and interpreting the reports of peasants and spies.
Of late, however, she had grown curiously shy of camps and the bivouacs of men, and had contented herself with bustling the workmen from Ludo and the coast villages who, as in common with their kind, dragged out their task as long as possible.
She looked hourly for a messenger from her husband. She was always expecting him, or at least a brief scrawled note from his order-book telling of his doings. But mostly she was content to stay within doors and receive the counsels and congratulations of her father and Don Juan Julio, who came daily up the slopes together to judge of the progress of the work. They shook their heads over the extravagance of the miradors (glass enclosed balconies) on every storey, ‘like a house in Victoria,’ as they said, approved the depth and shade of the verandahs, and the wind-screens which slid so easily upon unseen wheels. Their old bones would find kindly shelter there on windy days when they could ‘drink the sun’ nowhere else.
The great pinewood of the Rio Carlos which swept across the valley immediately below the green canal bridge was a wilderness of tall reeds, rusty ferns, and last year’s climbing vines. But at certain hours of the morning the sunlight sifted it through and through, glorifying everything. The pools of the poor despoiled river beneath glittered among arid wastes of stones, but the canal pushed calmly forward, a pleasant six foot breadth of green water sluicing placidly towards the mill wheels in the valley below.
Upon this restricted space, looking no bigger than an unfolded handkerchief threaded by the green serpent of the mill canal, Peter and his men looked down from a point of rock called Puerto Marguerita, the Gate of the Pearl. Beneath them, and four hundred yards away, dense brakes of bramble and fern, all pale turquoise and orange with the frosts of late autumn, hid the despoiled watercourses. All was bathed in a gracious and unreal opaline haze which rendered every object marvellously clear and lucid.
Peter and his band were struck with amazement at the changes which had been made behind the barricade of creepers and underbrush on the edge of the wood. They saw clearly, as on a map the felled trees, the intricate entanglements, the woven brushwood, the deadly openings in front, to right and left of the bridge, which were to receive gun barrels.
They also saw, very small and black, creeping hither and thither like abominable insects, the foreshortened figures of the two men in waiting. It was too far to distinguish features, but Peter recognised the jerky, disjoined movements of O’Hanlon, and the square scarabæic figure of Kinstrey, squatting toad-like at his loophole, patient as a spider among the cords of his web.
Before the party on the rock above the Val Carlos had time to change position a little cloud of mounted men was seen approaching along the highway from Pampeluña. The tall spare man with the cocked hat and white plume driven well down over his brows paused to consult a map. With a crook of the finger he summoned an officer to assist him. They consulted the chart together, verifying their position by pencil and compass. Then half a dozen men dismounted and knocked down half a dozen paces of mortarless stone wall, through which the cavalcade poured itself out upon the pleasant green sward of the canal pasture.
‘My God!’ exclaimed Peter hoarsely, as the plot flashed upon him, ‘the devils are waiting to murder the General! Give me my rifle.’
Even in Spain, where the thing is common, the word murder has an ugly sound. The twenty-two clustered closer about, and those who had rifles looked well to the priming. There was no order to fire. There would be none. Peter, and he alone, could pick off these two men before the tall man on the chestnut mare should ride opposite the muzzles of their guns over the low green arch of the canal bridge.
They were so near, it seemed to the eager watchers above that they could have pushed their victim with the muzzles of their pieces.
A tremulousness crept over the band. They could see the heads of the men in ambush go down. The tall man, whom they knew to be El Gran’ Lor’, the hope of Spain, rode nearer down the slope. In another minute he would be passing those deadly muzzles. Could nothing stop them? They saw their captain take a long breath, nestle the butt of his rifle against his cheek as if he loved it, and slowly depress the muzzle. It was not his habit to hang upon his shot, but now the waiting seemed interminable.
The feet of the General’s horse had touched the bridge, and the men’s heads bent towards the quarry.
With a jerk of all their nerves the twenty-two heard Peter’s shot ring out. He threw up the smoking barrel and instantly a second rifle was passed to him. The reek cleared in time for them to see O’Hanlon fallen flat on his face, his musket cocked harmlessly in the air, and his face between his hands.
But to him Peter paid no attention whatever. All his power of vision was concentrated on the shorter man, who had raised himself on one elbow and was looking back over his shoulder, meditating flight. But the General, riding fifty yards ahead, was now on the bridge, and the second villain, doubtless thinking of the great reward, bent again towards the loophole.
‘Crack!’ went Peter’s second shot. Kinstrey threw up his arms, his gun exploding harmlessly among the cord entanglements. Wellington rode straight at the bulwark of fallen trees, leaped his horse over the barricade, and stood gazing with astonishment at the two men, one dying, the other dead.’
The riddle was, however, easy enough to read. The breastwork, the loopholes, the cords to trip the horses were clear evidence of treachery, and the fluttering signals from above showed from which direction help had come.
Presently Peter came down and saluted with his usual grave decorum.
‘You fired those shots?’ said Wellington, almost in a tone of reprimand. He hated to be indebted to anyone, which always gave him an air of ill-humour when acknowledging favours face to face. On paper and in all reports, written and oral, no man was ever more ready to do justice to every subordinate.
‘I hit this second man a little too high,’ said Peter, touching Kinstrey with his foot, ‘but he was bending to the loophole, and I dared not hang upon the trigger.’
He noticed the mouth of Wellington’s horse bleeding. A bullet had glanced from the bridle, making a slight furrow on the cheek to the corner of the mouth.
‘The fellow came nearer than I had thought,’ Peter meditated, as Busaco, impatient of a stranger’s touch, tossed his noble head, which the frivolous declared grew more and more like that of his master every day.
‘God!’ cried Wellington, with a sudden outburst of anger, ‘this fellow embarrasses me. Shall we hang him or make him General? First, he destroys the French artillery at Corunna. Then he brings important dispatches which carry us across Portugal and all the Spains. Now he saves my life. What the devil can we do with such a fellow?’
‘Make him a General, as you say, your Excellency,’ suggested Ponsonby. ‘Cameron died this morning and the Anglo-Portuguese will follow this fellow anywhere.’
Wellington rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
‘What education have you?’ he jerked out, frowning his brows as if he were about to condemn Peter to death.
‘The best a man can have,’ quoth Peter: ‘Master of Arts of Edinburgh University.’
‘And how came you to be fighting like the devil all over the face of the earth from the Deccan to the Pyrenees?’
‘Indeed I don’t know,’ said Peter, ‘unless, like your Excellency, I had a taste for the job.’
Wellington laughed, and tapping him on the shoulder, ordered him to be off and take in hand Cameron’s brigade of Anglo-Portuguese.
‘Nippy little chaps they are, I understand, and need some leading; but you speak their language and your little band there can act as gallopers. Off with you and take hold! Ponsonby will give you a send off.’
Behold Peter installed as acting general of brigade! Pack was wounded, Crittenden dead. Only Campbell remained to help him with the useful fighting contingent which Wellington had made out of the Portuguese troops.
‘Good soldiers,’ approved Campbell, a red-bearded Highlander: ‘no Cortez, no numskull Spanish generals. Good big man (that’s you or me) says ‘Do this!’ Good little man smelling of garlic goes and does it without any question. Ever commanded a brigade before?’
‘Mostly Intelligence Department,’ said Peter, carefully picking his words, ‘but in India I took a command when it came my way. Here I have mostly been with the Spaniards – free companies and Romana’s army, which always does its best to fight another day. My fellows did not quite run away. They plundered. But I own a village up there to the north-west, and these twenty-two of my own people stick as close as any man could wish. I do not know what the Portuguese will say to them.’
‘Why, make them your personal escort. Give the stripes and the gold lace to the little ginger-coloured Dons, and you are all right.’
And now we have Peter general of the brigade, cloaked and cock-hatted at the expense of the British Government! The Bidassoa has been crossed. The last battle on Spanish soil fought. Before them Soult was sullenly retiring, fighting, as always, an excellent rearguard action. Bayonne, Toulouse were before him – Paris, triumph!
They halted awhile in the height of the last mountain pass, the great commander and Peter watching the slow passage of the troops across the Bidassoa.
‘Come with us,’ said Wellington; ‘there is good warm work ahead. We have got at the giant’s feet of clay at last. We will put you on the English Army List, and ‘Sir Peter’ will go very well with an estate – they tell me you are rich.’
‘I thank you, my Lord,’ said Peter very quietly, ‘but I have a little house and a village up there and in that house there is a wife – and the sound of a young child crying.’
‘Tut–tut!’ exclaimed Wellington explosively, and, wheeling, he set Busaco’s nose in the direction of the ford.
‘Dam sentimental Scotchman!’ grumbled the Chief. ‘Glad I was never taken that way. Where should I have been if I had?
But Peter was already a dim figure riding slowly up the misty pass, away from titles and honours, but every moment nearer to love and the crying of the young child whom he had never seen.
About the Author
S. R. Crockett was born in Balmaghie, Galloway, in 1859 and died in France on April 16th, 1914. During his life, he had over 60 novels published (many of them serialised) and hundreds of short stories/sketches appeared in the popular magazines. He was one of Scotland’s bestselling and best known authors in his day, but now is barely known of. To commemorate the 100th anniversary of his death, The Galloway Raiders has been set up and a major collection of 32 of his Galloway-based fictional works has been republished by Ayton Publishing Limited.
To find out more about S. R. Crockett, you can join The Galloway Raiders for FREE at www.gallowayraiders.co.uk
To find out more about S. R. Crockett, you can join The Galloway Raiders for FREE at www.gallowayraiders.co.uk