The Marquis of Bolibar (23 page)

"The colonel is inspecting our forward positions," Donop said, abashed. "He will remain there all night - tomorrow as well, perhaps."

"Take me to him!" Monjita entreated. "Tell me how I can get to him and God will reward you both with a thousand years of bliss."

Donop glanced at me briefly. We felt ashamed that the unjust course of action on which we were embarked should have compelled us to lie and confirm Monjita in her misapprehension, but we had no choice. The colonel could never be permitted to see her again.

"Very well," said Donop, "please yourself, but the outposts are a long way off and well within range of the enemy's guns."

"No matter," Monjita cried joyfully. "I'll swim the river if I must."

But all at once mistrust took hold of her, or so it seemed, perhaps because she remembered how we had pestered her to spend the night with us. She looked long and searchingly, first at Donop, then at me, as if she feared we still had designs on her.

"Wait here for me," she said. "I must go upstairs to fetch some things for the night. I shall not be long."

She returned after a while, bearing a small bundle. When I offered to carry it for her, she surrendered it with a hint of reluctance.

It was light — so light that I scarcely felt its weight. I held it in my hand, unaware that what I carried was perdition itself.

That little bundle spelled our inexorable doom and the destruction of the regiment: it contained the final signal.

I had arranged with Donop that I should guide Monjita through our lines and escort her to an enemy outpost. Attached to all guerrilla bands were British staff officers dispatched by Wellington and Rowland Hill to advise their commanders on all matters relating to the art of warfare. I intended to parley with one of them under a flag of truce and entrust Monjita to his care, representing her as a lady of quality for whom the commander of the beleaguered garrison solicited the enemy's protection.

I had resolved to row up the river in a boat, for all that I had seen during my early morning sortie persuaded me that this would be the safest route. Moreover, should the guerrillas decline to respect a flag of truce, I would have some prospect of getting out of range at speed by using the current and keeping to the shelter of the bushes on the bank.

We boarded the skiff at a spot below the walls where the town's many washerwomen ordinarily plied their trade. I took the oars while Monjita crouched in the bottom of the boat with her bundle.

Shots could be heard from the vicinity of the marketplace - an ominous sign. Fighting was in progress against the insurgents, and it must have proved difficult to quell them, for the colonel would not otherwise have given the order to open fire. Darkness was falling when Donop took leave of me with a handshake. His expression conveyed doubt and concern, together with the fear that we would never meet again, for my mission was fraught with danger and far from assured of success.

A moist wind smote my cheeks as I slowly and silently dipped the oars and the river scents rose around me. Carried downstream by the current, large ice-floes and clumps of uprooted brushwood and reeds grazed the sides of the boat. I had to duck my head at times to avoid being struck by the willows whose naked branches reached far out across the water. In the distance, the river and the dusky outlines of the bushes that flanked it merged into one immense nocturnal shadow.

One of our pickets challenged me at the first bend. I put in to the bank. First-Lieutenant von Froben appeared, recognized me — much to his surprise — and inquired my purpose and destination. I told him no more than I deemed necessary.

I learned that our outworks were only sparsely manned, the bulk of the troops having retired within the walls. The revolt had assumed dangerous proportions, and the colonel was being hard-pressed by large numbers of insurgents in the centre of the town.

"Let's hope the guerrillas leave us in peace tonight," Froben added anxiously, peering through the darkness at the valley where Saracho's men lay encamped.

Monjita understood no word of our conversation save one: the colonel's name. At that she raised her head and looked at me inquiringly. I rowed on.

"Will we be there soon?" she asked.

"Soon enough," I replied.

"But where are you taking me?" she said, growing uneasy. "Look, I can see the camp-fires of the Serranos." (The Spanish townsfolk called the guerrillas Serranos or "highlanders".)

I thought it time to tell her the truth.

"I have brought you here, Monjita, to place you under the protection of an enemy officer."

She gave a faint cry of surprise and consternation.

"And the colonel?"

"You will never see him again."

She stood up, causing the skiff to rock violently.

"You deceived me!" she cried, so close that I could feel her breath on my cheek.

"I had no choice. You'll resign yourself in the end, I'm sure. I have the highest opinion of your intelligence."

"Take me back or I'll call for help!"

"Do so by all means, but you'll call in vain. The sentries will not let you past the gate."

Despairingly, she broke into a flood of threats, entreaties and lamentations, but I stood firm. An idea had taken root in my mind: by carrying off Monjita in my skiff, I was lifting a curse from the regiment and the town. It was for her sake that we had given Bolibar's first and second signals, just as it was her fault that we had quarrelled with Günther, and that he now lay dead or dying in Eglofstein's room. If she saw the colonel again, she could not fail - to his detriment and ours — to disclose the true nature of our secret.

She ceased to plead and lament when she saw that it was futile, and I heard her quietly praying. Sobs mingled with her fervent supplications. Then she fell silent and I heard nothing more from her, just a gentle sigh and a low, lingering moan.

By now I had come to the second bend in the river. Great heaps of brushwood blazing on either bank turned its entire surface into a watery inferno of colour. Shadows flitted hither and thither on the shore. Then a voice hailed me, a shot rang out, and a bullet struck the water close beside my skiff.

I let go of the oars, hurriedly lit the lantern at my feet in the bottom of the boat, and swung it to and fro with one hand while waving a white handkerchief with the other. The skiff drifted into the bank. Guerrillas came running from all sides with lanterns, hurricane lamps and torches. There were now more than a hundred of them awaiting me at the water's edge, and among them, to my joy, I saw the scarlet cloak and white panache of a British officer in the Northumberland Fusiliers.

I leapt ashore with the handkerchief held high, strode up to this officer without heeding the others, and, with a dozen musket barrels levelled at my head, explained the reason for my presence.

He listened to me in silence, then made for Monjita, presumably intending to help her out of the skiff. I was about to follow when I felt a hand grip my shoulder and turned to find myself confronted by Colonel Saracho.

I recognized the Tanner's Tub at once. He was leaning on a stick, his massive legs swathed in strips of rag. Stuck in his red sash were knives, cartridges, pistols, several heads of garlic, and a lump of bread. Around his neck he wore a thong arrayed on which, like rosary beads, were pieces of biscuit.

"First and foremost," he growled, "you're my prisoner. As to the rest, we shall see."

"I came under a flag of truce," I protested.

Saracho chuckled gleefully.

"You drifted ashore like a rotting fish," he said. "And now, surrender your sword."

I hesitated, gauging the distance between the skiff and the spot where I stood. Before I could act, however, the British officer came over to me.

"Your commanding officer sends strange gifts," he drawled. "That girl is dead."

"Dead?" I exclaimed, and darted toward the skiff. Quick as I was, Saracho got there first. He bent over Monjita and shone his lantern on her face.

"She's dead, sure enough," he croaked. "What are we to do with her? Did you bring her here that we should sing a
Miserere
for her, say an Office for the Dead, a
De
profundi
s,
a
Requiescat,
a rosary?"

Before I could reply he gave a startled exclamation like the snarl of an infuriated cat. Straightening up, he gave me a long, hard stare.

"So that's it," he said in an altogether different tone of voice. "The knife has returned to its owner, eh? Very well, mark this!"

He drew a double-barrelled pistol from his sash. I reached for my sabre, thinking it was meant for me, but he fired both barrels in the air, one after the other, and whistled shrilly between times.

I knew that guerrilla's signal: it was a call to arms.

Saracho's bulky frame was still obstructing my view of the skiff and Monjita, but all at once I caught sight of his right hand. It was holding the dagger whose ivory hilt bore a representation of the Virgin with Christ's corpse across her knees: Bolibar's third signal!

The ground lurched beneath my feet. The men, the torches, the trees around me slowly swayed and revolved. My eyes discerned nothing but the knite and the drop of blood adhering to it: a drop of Monjita's life-blood. They followed that drop as it trickled down the blade, slowly, steadily and relentlessly, as if in obedience to some terrible, irrevocable law. And all at once I saw Monjita before me as I had seen her for the very first time. "Come here, you of the burning eyes!" The colonel's words rang in my head, and there she stood beside his armchair with the firelight upon her, and an infinity of sorrow and despair overcame me at the thought that she was dead. But now a voice cried out within me — a stranger's voice, not my own.

"That was the third signal!" it cried with angry vehemence. "The third signal, and you gave it!"

Then another voice spoke, seemingly from a great way off. I awoke from my dreamlike state to find myself alone on the river bank with Saracho and the British captain.

"Inform the one who sent you," the Tanner's Tub was saying, "that a quarter of an hour from now ..." He broke off. "It's you, by all the saints and angels! Or is it? This time I'm truly unsure."

He drew back, held his lantern close to my face, and began to laugh.

"It seems to me I saw this gentleman only lately, wearing morocco shoes and silken hose. How say you, Captain?"

The British officer smiled.

"It delights me to recognize you despite your disguise, My Lord Marquis. As I have had the honour to assure you once before, sir, yours is not a face one readily forgets."

"The Señor Marques has done his work well," Saracho growled contentedly. "If the townsfolk have risen in revolt, La Bisbal is as good as ours. We shall storm it a quarter of an hour from now."

And the singular thing was that in me, Lieutenant Jochberg of the Nassau Grenadiers, those words aroused the feeling that I was indeed the Marquis of Bolibar, and for the space of a second I experienced
his
pride and exultation at having given the third signal and completed
his
task.

And then that momentary delusion left me: I recovered my wits and became my wretched, despairing self again.

Transfixed with horror, I knew that I must return at once, warn my comrades, raise the alarm . . . I was into the skiff in a trice.

"Where are you off to?" the British captain called after me. "Stay here with us, your work is done!"

"Not yet!" I cried, and the skiff, aided by the current, sped downstream.

CATASTROPHE

My memory has retained but little, thank heaven, of those doom-laden hours in which the Nassau Regiment and the Crown Prince's Own fought their last terrible and unavailing battle. The events of that last night have become compressed in my mind into a shadowy phantasmagoria of fire and blood, whirling snow and clouds of powder-smoke. Captain von Eglofstein I never saw again. As for Brockendorf, he appeared to me only in a dream. One rainy night at home in Germany many years later, I was abruptly wakened by a nightmare. I had seen Brockendorf - seen him quite plainly in my sleep as he burst from a blazing house with four Spaniards in pursuit. He wore neither shirt nor tunic, and I could see the curly black hairs on his barrel of a chest. He was wielding his sabre with one hand and fending off sword-thrusts with the other, which had his cloak wound round it. Three or four blows he delivered; then he dropped his sabre and fell to the ground. A small, fat, bearded man carrying a lantern bent over him and took possession of the cloak.

While the little bearded fellow was inspecting his prize and weighing it in his hand, there came a shot — a shot that made no sound — and he collapsed with Brockendorf's cloak draped over him. A full moon slowly emerged from behind the clouds, and the wind buried both corpses beneath a mound of driven snow.

Was it only a nocturnal hallucination, a belated nightmare, that wrested me from my uneasy slumbers, or did I really witness Brockendorf's death, and had the tumult of the time so completely erased that spectacle from my mind, like so many others, that I forgot it until a distressing dream retrieved it from the depths of oblivion many years after the event? I cannot say.

I did, however, see the colonel fall with my own eyes, as well as Donop and the rest, because I came too late to warn them: the third signal and Saracho's assault sealed their fate.

I leapt ashore and burst through the willows on the bank to find myself among some fleeing grenadiers who had abandoned our forward positions. The guerrillas were hot on their heels and gave them no respite. Each man ran for his life, though many fell, never to rise again. Swept along by the turmoil, I came at last to the outskirts of the town.

Here I overtook First-Lieutenant von Froben, who had been badly wounded and was reeling along the wall of a house like a drunken man. I eventually managed to persuade a handful of the fugitives to make a stand, and for a while we held the guerrillas off. Then came a sudden rumour that the rebels had outflanked us and were firing on us from the rear. There was no holding the men after that. They jumped up and fled down the street, and I with them.