The Marquis of Bolibar (16 page)

But she shook her head.

"If I understood you aright," she said, and again I seemed to detect a hint of mockery in her tone, "- if I understood you aright, I shall not experience the novel and singular emotion you have promised me until I am actually on my way to you. That being so, I cannot now tell in whose arms my journey will end."

Opening wide the door to the work-room, she told her father that he had painted enough for today and that supper was on the table.

Don Ramon and the other two were standing before the
Entombment of Christ,
examining the finished picture by candlelight. The artist seemed dissatisfied with his work.

"Where physical posture and facial expression are concerned, my Joseph of Arimathea looks truly pitiable."

"You might have made him a little handsomer," the young man grumbled, plucking at his woefully short sleeves.

"But his gestures are very lifelike," said the impersonator of the pious woman from Jerusalem, and bent a consoling gaze on the painter and his model.

Brockendorf could not forbear to pass judgement himself.

"There are numerous faces in the picture," he said, "and all of them different. "

"That is because I always paint from life," Don Ramon told him. "There are bad painters who take the finished works of other masters as their models. If you care to purchase this painting, it will cost you only forty reals. As you yourself have observed, it contains a wealth of figures. You could, if you prefer, have two smaller pictures for the same price. The choice is entirely yours."

"I'll take a brace," said Brockendorf, strongly disposed in the artist's favour by the successful outcome of our venture, "and the bigger they are, the better."

He produced two gold coins whose existence he had artfully concealed from us, for he owed us all money lost at cards. Don Ramon, having pocketed them, thrust the saintly captain and martyr Achatius into Brockendorfs right hand and the Florentine subdeacon Zenobius into his left.

It had meanwhile been agreed with Monjita that the four of us would await her that night at St Daniel's Convent. We went off to buy wine and supper. We were all in high spirits, but Brockendorf's exuberance was such that he hardly knew if he was on his head or his heels. He frightened an old woman by hissing at her like a goose, hid the ladder of a dovecote belonging to a nailsmith in the Calle Geronimo, and insisted on entering the shop of the potter's wife, with whom he was wholly unacquainted, and demanding to know why she had last week deceived her husband with the club-footed clerk of the magistrate's court.

THE SONG OF TALAVERA

St Daniel's Convent, from which the Calle de los Carmelitas took its name, served us as a powder magazine and workshop. The friars, who belonged to the order of Discalced or Barefoot Carmelites, had long since quit the building to fight against us in the bands of irregulars led by Empecinado and Colonel Saracho. The refectory and dormitory, the friars' cells, the cloisters and the great chapter house - all these were now given over by day to grenadiers from our regiment and the Prince's Own, who were engaged in the manufacture and filling of shells, grenades and fire-balls. The chapel, where Brockendorf proposed to spend the night (each of us performed this duty once a week), was strewn with empty powder bags, nails, axes, hammers, soldering irons, box lids, cooking pots, and brightly painted clay pipes discarded by the grenadiers. Lines drawn in chalk on the stone-flagged floor defined the boundaries between the various squads. Discernible on the walls were faded frescoes that depicted the blinding of Samson and the slaying of the giant Goliath, and some grenadier, by adding a moustache and beard, had transformed the shepherd boy David into a likeness of our majestic regimental drum-major. Above the west door, in a carved and gilded frame, hung the portrait of a monk, a handsome man with an episcopal cross on his chest.

The two table braziers, which filled the air with dense clouds of smoke, presented us with a choice between suffocating and freezing. We had finished our supper, and Brockendorfs orderly, who was reputed to be the best forager in the army, was clearing away the remains of our meal.

Across the way from the convent, and separated from it only by the narrow Calle de los Carmelitas, stood the Marquis of Bolibar's town house. By peering through a gap in the broken chapel window we could see into the colonel's brightly illuminated bedchamber. He was seated on his bed, fully clothed, while the surgeon of the Hessian battalion shaved him by the light of two candelabra placed on the table. His tricorn and a brace of pistols lay on a chair.

The sight of him sent us wild with glee because tonight he would wait in vain for Monjita, who had chosen to come to us instead. We all hated the colonel and feared him at the same time, and Brockendorf gave vent to the rancour in his heart.

"There sits old Vinegar-Jug with his aching head and his shrivelled heart. Will she come ere long, Colonel? Is she already on her way to you? You rejoice too soon, Colonel. There's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip!"

"Not so loud, Brockendorf, he may hear you."

"He'll hear nothing, see nothing and know nothing," Brockendorf crowed triumphantly. "When Monjita comes we'll douse the lights. I shall crown him with the Turkish crescent twice over in the dark, and he'll notice nothing."

"Being as proud as he is of his noble ancestry," sneered Donop, "he can have St Luke's bird added to his coat of arms. That had a pair of horns too."

"Hush, Donop," Eglofstein whispered uneasily, "he has sharp ears — you don't know him." And he drew us away from the window, though the glass was so thick that the colonel could not have caught a single word of what we were saying about him. "He can hear an old crone cough three miles away, and if he loses his temper he'll have you all manoeuvring for three hours in the middle of a ploughed field, as he did last week."

"I could have choked, I was so angry," Brockendorf growled, moderating his voice. "It's high time he bit the dust. The way he routs us out of our billets every two minutes!"

"You're a fine one to talk," Donop protested. "You entered the regiment as a captain, but Jochberg and I! We served under old Vinegar-Jug as officer cadets. A dog's life, it was. Handling currycombs and case-shot every day, carting horse dung out of the stables, toting a week's ration of oats about on our backs ..."

The church clock of Nuestra Señora del Pilar began to strike. Donop counted the strokes aloud.

"Nine o'clock. She'll be here soon."

"Here we all sit," said Eglofstein, resting his head on his hand, "waiting for one lone girl. There must surely be plenty of girls in this town as beautiful as Monjita if not more so, but I'm dazzled, God help me. I can see only the one."

"Not I," said Brockendorf, and took a generous pinch of snuff. "I have eyes for other girls too. Had you visited my billet on Sunday night, you would have found me with one such: raven-haired, shapely, and quite content with the three groschen I paid her. Her name was Rosina. Nevertheless, I wouldn't say no to Monjita."

He blew some tobacco dust from his sleeve before continuing.

"Three groschen is little enough. The whores at Frascati's in Paris and at the Salon des Etrangers have cost me more in their time."

One of the candles had burned down and was guttering and sizzling. Eglofstein lit another.

"A great deal more," Brockendorf added with a sigh.

"Listen!" Donop said suddenly, and gripped me by the shoulder.

"What is it?"

"Overhead, didn't you hear? There it goes again! It came from the organ loft!"

"A bat!" roared Brockendorf. "He's afraid of a bat, the ninny! Look, it's over there now, clinging to the wall. Donop, I do believe you're trembling. You thought His Lordship the Marquis of Bolibar was seated at the organ and about to give the signal."

He set off up the spiral stairway that led to the organ loft.

"The Marquis must surely know of some secret passage leading from his house to the convent," said Donop. "Sooner or later he'll climb those stairs and give the second signal, just as he gave the first."

"Who's afraid of a bat?" Brockendorf called down. He fiddled with the keys and stops but failed to produce a single note.

"Hey, Donop, you learned to play the organ. Come here! Can you find your way around all these flutes and pipes?"

"Brockendorf," Eglofstein commanded, "leave that organ be and come down here!"

"How droll," came Brockendorfs disembodied voice from overhead, and the spacious, lofty chapel lent it a menacing, sinister quality, "— how droll to reflect that if I, up here, were to play 'The Song of the Martinmas Goose' or 'Margrete, Margrete, your shift is peeping out', Günther and Saracho would dance a jig in the outwork over yonder."

Even Eglofstein seemed hugely entertained by Brockendorf's notion. He smote his thighs and laughed till the walls rang.

"That fellow Günther!" he exclaimed. "The windbag, the braggart! If only I could see his face when the bullets start whistling past his nose!"

Meantime, Donop had climbed the stairs as well. He inspected the organ and gave us a painstaking description of its ingenious and unusual design.

It had a wind-chest, pipework, fluework, and reedwork. There were also rows of stops which Donop manipulated and enumerated, each of them having a different name. One was called the principal, another the bourdon or drone, another the spitz-gamba, another the quinte-viola, another the great sub- bass, and yet another the gemshorn.

"Curious names," mused Brockendorf, "and yet, for all these flutes, pipes and oboes, one cannot strike up an air that's fit for dancing, only a wretched 'Benedicat vos'."

"But one
can
play fugues and toccatas, preludes and interludes," said Donop, springing to the defence of his instrument.

"Tread the bellows for me," Brockendorf urged him. "I've a mind to see if I can manage a 'Gloria'." And he began to sing in a raucous voice.

Our worthy curate, woe, alas

forgot his Latin during Mass.

Kyrie eleison!

Donop crouched down behind the corpus and trod the bellows while Brockendorf ran both hands wildly over the keys, and all at once the organ emitted a thin, shrill note like the squeak of a rat. Faint as it was, it startled Donop and Brockendorf and sent them scampering down the stairs as fast as if the Devil himself were at their heels.

"Brockendorf!" roared Eglofstein. "Come down here, you raving lunatic! You've lost your wits!"

Brockendorf stood there panting, still aghast that the organ should so suddenly have come to life and squeaked like a rat.

"I meant to strike up a jig for young Günther," he said. "Like it or not, I was only jesting."

"Spare us any more such pranks, Brockendorf," Eglofstein growled. "We shall be at grips with the guerrillas soon enough, and then you can win your Legion d'Honneur."

We fell silent for a while, clustering around the braziers on account of the cold. Then we heard footsteps in the street.

"Monjita!" cried Donop, and ran to the window. "She's here!"

But it was not Monjita; it was the surgeon, who, having trimmed the colonel's red beard for him, was returning to his billet lantern in hand.

"Compline must be over," said Eglofstein. "What can be keeping her?"

Our legs and fingers were numb with cold. We marched briskly up and down to warm ourselves, arm in arm, and the muffled echo of our footsteps resounded from the chapel's walls.

Again we sought to while away the time with conversation, and Brockendorf and Donop fell to arguing how the friars of the convent had occupied themselves when assembled in their chapter house.

"They would have sat there," Donop opined, "debating at great length whether Christ had a guardian angel and who was the holier, St Joseph or the Virgin Mary."

"Wrong!" said Eglofstein. "You credit Spanish friars with too much erudition. Meat and drink are their true field of study. Any disputations in which they engaged would have concerned the form to be taken by the letters they addressed to the town's wealthy citizens, soliciting lard and butter in the name of their patron saint. You would find scores of such missives upstairs in the Frater Circator's cell."

"Those mendicant friars know how to live," Brockendorf said with an envious sigh. "Whenever one of them comes my way, all twelve pockets of his habit are stuffed with bread, wine, eggs, cheese, fresh meat and sausages - victuals enough to feed a man for a fortnight. The wine is poor, though. Spanish priests drink a wine as black as ink - it agrees with no one but fools like themselves."

He came to a halt and warmed his hairy hands over one of the braziers. The cold had become unbearable without benefit of stove or blanket, and an icy wind was whistling through the broken window. Donop peered down into the street, burning with impatience, but still Monjita failed to appear. Eglofstein stamped each numb and frozen foot in turn.

"I and my half-company," he said, "were once billeted in an abbey at Bebenhausen, a place in Swabia. I've never known better quarters before or since. We drank arrack and Rhenish wine, and both were so plentiful that we could all have washed our hands in them daily. By night we slept on chasubles, but we suffered from the cold, then as now. It was a hard winter, and the frost was such that crows fell lifeless to the ground and church bells sprang cracks. One night we stoked the fire with two worm-eaten choir stalls."

"You must have had to pay my lord abbot a pretty sum when you marched on."

"Pay?" Eglofstein laughed. "Do you suffer the ox to demand his hide back when your boots are full of holes? Pay? Who in Germany ruled the roost at that time? His highness the elector, his lordship the landgrave, his honour the magistrate, his grace the bishop. Everyone presumed to give orders — audit officers and government ministers daily issued decrees and edicts which no one obeyed. Nowadays, of course, it's another matter: only one man rules, namely, Bonaparte, and all our princes and counts and provosts and prelates have to dance — nay, caper like hungry poodles - to his tune." He paused to listen. "That must be Monjita at last!"