Sharpe’s Battle: The Battle of Fuentes de Oñoro, May 1811. Bernard Cornwell

children get posted into the army.’

      ‘It has much the same effect, my Lord, except in the matter of angels.’

      Wellington gave a brief laugh, then gestured with the letter. ‘So how did this reach us?’

      ‘The usual way, my Lord. Smuggled out of Valençay by Ferdinand’s servants and brought south to the Pyrenees where it was given to partisans for forwarding to us.’

      ‘With a copy to London, eh? Any chance of intercepting the London copy?’

      ‘Alas, sir, gone these two weeks. Probably there already.’

      ‘Hell, damn and hell again. Damn!’ Wellington stared gloomily at the bridge where a sling cart was salvaging the fallen barrel of a dismounted French cannon. ‘So what to do, eh, Hogan? What to do?’

      The problem was simple enough. The letter, copied to the Prince Regent in London, had come from the exiled King Ferdinand of Spain who was now a prisoner of Napoleon in the French château at Valençay. The letter was pleased to announce that His Most Catholic Majesty, in a spirit of cooperation with his cousin of England and in his great desire to drive the French invader from the sacred soil of his kingdom, had directed the Real Compañía Irlandesa of His Most Catholic Majesty’s household guard to attach itself to His Britannic Majesty’s forces under the command of the Viscount Wellington. Which gesture, though it sounded generous, was not to the Viscount Wellington’s taste. He did not need a stray company of royal palace guards. A battalion of trained infantry with full fighting equipment might have been of some service, but a company of ceremonial troops was about as much use to the Viscount Wellington as a choir of psalm-singing eunuchs.

      ‘And they’ve already arrived,’ Hogan said mildly.

      ‘They’ve what?’ Wellington’s question could be heard a hundred yards away where a dog, thinking it was being reproved, slunk away from some fly-blackened guts that trailed from the eviscerated body of a French artillery officer. ‘Where are they?’ Wellington asked fiercely.

      ‘Somewhere on the Tagus, my Lord, being barged towards us.’

      ‘How the hell did they get here?’

      ‘According to my correspondent, my Lord, by ship. Our ships.’ Hogan put a pinch of snuff on his left hand, then sniffed the powder up each nostril. He paused for a second, his eyes suddenly streaming, then sneezed. His horse’s ears flicked back at the noise. ‘The commander of the Real Compañía Irlandesa claims he marched his men to Spain’s east coast, my Lord,’ Hogan went on, ‘then took ship to Menorca where our Royal Navy collected them.’

      Wellington snorted his derision. ‘And the French just let that happen? King Joseph just watched half the royal guard march away?’ Joseph was Bonaparte’s brother and had been elevated to the throne of Spain, though it was taking three hundred thousand French bayonets to keep him there.

      ‘A fifth of the royal guard, my Lord,’ Hogan gently corrected the General. ‘And yes, that’s exactly what Lord Kiely says. Kiely, of course, being their comandante.’

      ‘Kiely?’

      ‘Irish peer, my Lord.’

      ‘Damn it, Hogan, I know the Irish peerage. Kiely. Earl of Kiely. An exile, right? And his mother, I remember, gave money to Tone back in the nineties.’ Wolfe Tone had been an Irish patriot who had tried to raise money and men in Europe and America to lead a rebellion against the British in his native Ireland. The rebellion had flared into open war in 1798 when Tone had invaded Donegal with a small French army that had been roundly defeated and Tone himself had committed suicide in his Dublin prison rather than hang from a British rope. ‘I don’t suppose Kiely’s any better than his mother,’ Wellington said grimly, ‘and she’s a witch who should have been smothered at birth. Is his Lordship to be trusted, Hogan?’

      ‘So far as I hear, my Lord, he’s a drunk and a wastrel,’ Hogan said. ‘He was given command of the Real Compañía Irlandesa because he’s the only Irish aristocrat in Madrid and because his mother had influence over the King. She’s dead now, God rest her soul.’ He watched a soldier try to fork up the spilt French officer’s intestines with his bayonet. The guts kept slipping off the blade and finally a sergeant yelled at the man to either pick the offal up with his bare hands or else leave it for the crows.

      ‘What has this Irish guard been doing since Ferdinand left Madrid?’ Wellington asked.

      ‘Living on sufferance, my Lord. Guarding the Escorial, polishing their boots, staying out of trouble, breeding, whoring, drinking and saluting the French.’

      ‘But not fighting the French.’

      ‘Indeed not.’ Hogan paused. ‘It’s all too convenient, my Lord,’ he went on. ‘The Real Compañía Irlandesa is permitted to leave Madrid, permitted to take ship, and permitted to come to us, and meanwhile a letter is smuggled out of France saying the company is a gift to you from His imprisoned Majesty. I smell Frog paws all over it, my Lord.’

      ‘So we tell these damn guards to go away?’

      ‘I doubt we can. In London the Prince Regent will doubtless be flattered by the gesture and the Foreign Office, you may depend, will consider any slight offered to the Real Compañía Irlandesa to be an insult to our Spanish allies, which means, my Lord, that we are stuck with the bastards.’

      ‘Are they good for anything?’

      ‘I’m sure they’ll be decorative,’ Hogan allowed dubiously.

      ‘And decoration costs money,’ Wellington said. ‘I suppose the King of Spain did not think to send his guard’s pay chest?’

      ‘No, my Lord.’

      ‘Which means I’m paying them?’ Wellington inquired dangerously, and, when Hogan’s only answer was a seraphic smile, the General swore. ‘God damn their eyes! I’m supposed to pay the bastards? While they stab me in the back? Is that what they’re here for, Hogan?’

      ‘I wouldn’t know, my Lord. But I suspect as much.’

      A gust of laughter sounded from a fatigue party that had just discovered some intimate drawings concealed in a dead Frenchman’s coat tails. Wellington winced at the noise and edged his horse further away from the raucous group. Some crows fought over a pile of offal that had once been a French skirmisher. The General stared at the unpleasant sight, then grimaced. ‘So what do you know about this Irish guard, Hogan?’

      ‘They’re mostly Spanish these days, my Lord, though even the Spanish-born guards have to be descended from Irish exiles. Most of the guardsmen are recruited from the three Irish regiments in Spanish service, but a handful, I imagine, will be deserters from our own army. I’d suspect that most of them are patriotic to Spain and are probably willing to fight against the French, but undoubtedly a handful of them will be afrancesados, though in that regard I’d suspect the officers before the men.’ An afrancesado was a Spaniard who supported the French and almost all such traitors came from the educated classes. Hogan slapped a horsefly that had settled on his horse’s neck. ‘It’s all right, Jeremiah, just a hungry fly,’ he explained to his startled horse, then turned back to Wellington. ‘I don’t know why they’ve been sent here, my Lord, but I am sure of two things. First, it will be a diplomatic impossibility to get rid of them, and second we have to assume that it’s the French who want them here. King Ferdinand, I’ve no doubt, was gulled into writing the letter. I hear he’s not very clever, my Lord.’

      ‘But you are, Hogan. It’s why I put up with you. So what do we do? Put them to latrine digging?’

      Hogan shook his head. ‘If you employ the King of Spain’s household guard on menial tasks, my Lord, it will be construed as an insult to our Spanish allies as well as to His Catholic Majesty.’

      ‘Damn His Catholic Majesty,’ Wellington growled, then stared balefully towards the trench-like grave where the French dead were now being unceremoniously laid in a long, white, naked row. ‘And the junta?’ he