Under guard in Lisbon

Raoul stared forward. "You know how important Prideaux and his papers were - you better than I. You took great risks to obtain them because of the value they would be to you. And for the same reason, we had to stop you from getting them, and when we were too late for that, to ensure that you did not have time to study them, or bring them back here." He hesitated and glanced at Maturin.

"Were they worth all the death and pain?"

Such a very hard, painful question to answer, and, yet, at the same time, such a very easy one. He looked up into des Sablières' face. "Yes. If they bring us even one step closer to a world without Bonaparte and his ilk, they are worth it."

Raoul flinched as if he had been struck. "That - - Yes, you believe that. Let us not dispute..."

He turned back. "We had been on patrols around Oporto, but were sent south and ordered to go with Citizen Ickx. He was - I was to follow his orders. And there was nothing wrong about it, to begin with. We simply had to find Prideaux and take what he had already gathered back to Oporto. He - Prideaux - had asked for a messenger to be sent, but Ickx was more than a messenger." He shook his head. "It was not an easy ride, but we stayed as clear as possible of any villages. We did not wish to meet with the irregulars, or... "

Stephen wondered briefly at how cold he felt, how numb. "If he was not just a messenger, what else was he?" Stephen had his suspicions, but if des Sablières could confirm anything, so much the better. There was the possibilty that Ickx had been Prideaux's mover, but he sincerely doubted it - more likely by far that Ickx was further down the heirarchy. No, the mover remained unknown, until every one of the papers had been deciphered, and perhaps still even then.

The captain was checking his anguish, but not very successfully, and Stephen could not understand how a man, apparently intelligent and kind, could follow Bonaparte. Was it that cowardice again, a reluctance to create trouble for himself? No, there were the signs of genuine belief and commitment, and that was far worse.

"Ickx? I do not know - I had never seen him before he was put in charge of our expedition. He may have recently come from Paris, but ..." Raoul caught himself up. Ickx had hardly been forthcoming, but his knowledge of Portuguese and of the back roads by which they had travelled so far unseen suggested that he had been in Portugal, not France. He should not tell this British agent things he did not already know... But Ickx was at the centre of the cause of Raoul's distress, and there was little point in protecting him, now that he was dead.

"I think he had worked in the area, but as what, I cannot say. I only know that he had an air of being, not just in command, but dangerous to refuse. I - I was not in France during the Terror, of course, but I could imagine him as one of those sending people to the guillotine, just for getting in his way. He was not sent to collect the papers - he decided who went and how."

Stephen had assumed that because Ickx had been on the move, he was subordinate to Prideaux, but it could have been that the man's talents were more similar to Stephen's own - not a question of hierarchy then, but skill. What else was Ickx's mission? Was Prideaux to tell him something personally? There had been a very small number of papers in the sheath in a different hand, for most of the letters from other agents had been copied up in case their handwriting could be recognised, and one of those few had been the letter containing the description of Domanova and the mention of Dutourd. This French captain, for all his youth, was canny - "was not sent". Why had Ickx chosen to come so far south? What was his purpose? He remembered the name that had appeared so frequently in the papers - Ducos. There were so many threads, but not yet enough light by which to untangle them.

"Would you have turned around and returned to Porto, were Prideaux still alive and the papers there?"

Raoul looked at him curiously. "As far as I know we would have done. I had no other orders. The troop stayed in a wood some distance from Óbidos, and Ickx and I went in to collect the papers. He would have gone alone..." He paused, wondering where this admission went. Nowhere, he decided." I went with him, because I thought he should have protection. I was to take him to Óbidos, and bring him back with the papers. But Prideaux was dead, and the papers - gone."

"Did he know Prideaux personally, I wonder?" Stephen muttered in the tone of thinking aloud. This story, simply factual thus far, but told in the tone of voice of a penitent, was bewildering - not in what was being said, but why it was being said - what was he building up to? The young man's internal anguish must be exerting a pressure on him to speak - occasionally he would stop, rethink a point, and then go on, concealing one detail or another - but the mounting tension was making Stephen increasingly uncomfortable, and he had little conscious idea of why.

Raoul ran his mind back over such conversation as he had had with Ickx on their journey - little enough, to be sure. There had never been any warmth in his voice - he had spoken simply of 'their contact', and there had been annoyance rather than distress at the news of his death.

It had not been a question - and he was not of course obliged to answer questions - but he responded nevertheless. "I cannot say - he said nothing to indicate that he did, or that there was any friendship between them. But he may have known St-Laurent. The man admitted him to the house - and ... " Scraps of conversation came back to him with alarming clarity - Ickx claiming that St-Laurent was important, that his return to Oporto would be of vital assistance to the French. He stopped, flushing. "M Ickx did not confide in me," he said.

Stephen raised his eyebrows at that - Ickx and Saint-Laurent? Had the former sent the latter to spy on Prideaux? The clerk certainly had spoken of his employer with intense dislike...

"Sure, I would not have expected it of him."

Stephen was annoyed at himself. He had fortified himself for the long walk (for while he had not known quite how long it was to be, he knew that it was longer than he could comfortably manage) with a rather large dose of laudanum before he left his lodgings - it had done wonders against the pain in his head and leg, to be sure, but he was tired already, and the drug was blunting his thoughts. He had never expected to make the journey with des Sablières, and would never have dreamed that the man would be so talkative, and on such a delicate subject! Discretion had turned into outright taciturnity in Stephen - a result of his birth, his upbringing, his personality and above all the risks he took every day he worked as an intelligence agent - and he was little less than shocked by what and how the captain was telling him. But he damed his leg, damned his head, and above all damned his tincture. At least his memory was unaffected, he hoped, a naturally brilliant memory, at least in certain subjects of a 'terra firma' nature, honed by years of Benedictine education and rote learning, and he would be able to puzzle out the threads eventually, if only he could remember all of this.

Raoul walked on. He could see the tower now, but it was surely still a long way off. Maturin was walking more easily, but ... No, Raoul could not blame him for not responding more fully. He had said little that required a response. He had been talking - possibly too much - but he had not come to the point. He was not sure he knew what the point was - what did he expect?

Another moment's thought and he recognized what he was doing - he was trying to shift the blame for what he had done, or rather for what he had not done, onto Ickx and St-Laurent. Like a child, although as a child he had known the value of honesty.

"Things changed after Óbidos," he said simply. "It became a hunt - for you, and for the papers. To have returned without them would have been failure - for Ickx certainly, but also for me. We knew - St-Laurent knew..."

Stephen recognised the shift of tone and posture in des Sablières, the drifting off into an uncomfortable silence, and thought that they might finally be reaching the crux of the matter. "If you will forgive my weakness, might we stop to rest for a moment?"

Raoul came to a halt immediately. "I am sorry, sir. I was not thinking... Of course - the tower is there, but we are still a long way away." On the seaward side, the hill descended quite steeply, the ground sandy with tussocks of spiny grass and small bent bushes. On the other side a low stone wall separated the road from the cultivated terraces, offering a chance to sit.

"That is better," said Stephen, sitting down and stretching out his leg, which he was most annoyed to discover was stiff, despite the laudanum's dulling of the pain. "I have a canteen of water with me, if you would like some, by way of apology for the inconvenience." He watched des Sablières closely - he would inevitably continue his story when he chose to, but Stephen wondered what, at this crucial juncture, it would turn into.

"No - I am not thirsty. And it is no inconvenience. It is your goodness, after all." Raoul sat on the wall a little way from Maturin, and for a moment stared out. He did not immediately turn when he started speaking again.

"I did not know any cavalrymen in England - and it might be different there, anyway. Infantry officers I did know, of course." He smiled. "I had this vision: of cavaliers, knights in shining armour, riding, singing, saving damsels..." He turned to face the doctor. "It isn't like that at all. But I did try, I tried to draw a line which I could not honourably cross. And then I discovered that the ends of the line were being eaten away. But I still tried."

Stephen looked aside - the weakness angered him, and he knew that he would have sympathised were it not for the deaths so fresh in his mind. He knew of what des Sablières spoke - apart from his oath as a doctor, he had his own particular codes and ethics that he knew to most men would seem quite eccentric, and sometimes all self-worth hinged on a difference of definition. "Where was your line drawn?"

"To begin with? The most honourable and impractical line: to fight, I suppose, like a gentleman, only against the soldiers of the enemies of France; to spare the wounded; to help women and children - but the wounded fight back, even a man with one leg can fire a musket, and you cannot wait to see if he will. And there were so many women and children, and the sick and dying ... " They had ridden past, unable to help, and at least his troop had not wilfully killed or abuse them.

He bit his lip. "And by the end, all that was left was to defend my own personal honour, to keep my word, to do my duty, to my men and..." he looked up defiantly "and to the Emperor." He had failed even to hold that line.

"The first I agree with, and I believe you have held to them - even in the choice between your honour and your men, to some extent you managed to hold to both. But to the last - you are an intelligent man, and possibly even a good one; I cannot fathom how you might be loyal to that tyrant. Every free-thinking man or woman is an enemy to him, and if you are loyal, to you as well. So many evils - all imperialism and propaganda and conscription and desecration and invasion and informing and secret, squalid tortures of any man who resists. Perhaps that is why you found your line eroding."

Raoul was shaking his head, in a refusal to listen as much as in denial. "That is ... Without him, France was lost. Your revolution - that was so much admired - turned into a horror - not even a secret horror, but an open one. Under the emperor France can rebuild herself, and she must rebuild, she cannot go back to what was before. If you supported the Revolution, then you must see that France has to find another answer than the Bourbons, and the way things were before. Bonaparte has given us hope, and pride, and a future, not just a ruined past."

Stephen should have been able to keep his exasperation under control, but the vitriol that flowed was backed by all the pain and fear and guilt of the past week, and he could not stop himself. "With him, France is lost, and every other country he pulls down with him! Think of Venice, Naples, Switzerland - Catalonia. I saw what the Revolution became, perhaps clearer than you did, and the pain of it nearly killed me. France is going back to what it was - the re-establishment of slavery, for God's love - or growing into something worse, something rotten and evil, out of the country I love most in all the world. No, if loyal to Bonaparte, Frenchmen have but three choices - become Ickx, become Saint-Laurent, or stand back and do nothing as the evil spreads." His hands were shaking in his anger.

"No. This will not last forever - you said that yourself. But if France is to heal its own wounds, it must have peace, must have security. And ..." Raoul closed his eyes. You had to defend your borders, and if they were threatened, then the threat must be removed - which led to new borders to defend.

And Maturin's conclusion cut deeply, because, even if his earlier argument was wrong, even if the evil was not the fault of the Emperor but of those who claimed to serve him but really served their own ends - men like Ickx and St-Laurent - he had stood back and allowed evil to happen. That was what made this confessional so necessary, not his support of the Emperor.

He opened his eyes and looked away from Maturin's face, and his anger. "That was not because of loyalty to the Emperor. That was my own fault. I did not choose - I refused to face the choice at all. You know what I am talking about. I let them go into the village to find out - I could say that I thought it was just asking questions, that a French Hussar would cause alarm, where two civilians were able to move freely. But ... But I knew what Ickx was. And I stayed on the edge of the village." He swallowed and turned back to Maturin. "I did not know - but I did not allow myself even to suspect. And when they came back, I did not ask. That is what I cannot forget."

"I know." Stephen's anger did not dissipate - with every word it increased. He felt the deep rage with which he was so familiar, the fire that had caused so many duels, the contemptuous fury he had felt in Mahon. He needed conflict, something to release it, along with all of his own guilt. Miguel and Rosa had become involved because of him - he had been Ickx's quarry, reason, excuse, and the simple fact was that if he had not gone to Obidos, two kind, innocent men would still be alive.

And des Sablières sat there, looking at him. Stephen stood, anger giving him energy but robbing him of grace. "What do you expect me to say to you? What do you want me to say to you? I pray that you never forget - never forget what your Emperor is doing to this country, and all the others it has overrun, never forget what occurred because of your cowardice." He met the man's gaze. "Why? Why did you not stop him, or even ask, for God's love? Were you afraid of him? Was it cowardice? Or was it-"

Raoul stood up too, facing Maturin's anger with his own, though that was directed back at himself. "Why? Because we were the hunters. Because we had to catch you, or lose what advantage Prideaux had gained. I do not know what that was - the hounds do not ask the huntsman the value of the fox. I was thinking about that hunt - about capturing... About catching up with you, retrieving the papers. Strangely - you will not believe this - I was trying to work out how to save your life - yours and the others." He gave a short laugh. "I had a good idea what would happen when Ickx caught up. There were so few of you, and enough of us - I thought - to ensure an easy victory. We had not discussed it, but I was determined not to allow him to turn it into one of those unfortunate incidents where everyone of the small enemy patrol is killed. I thought I could handle that, and I arranged things with Thierry, of course, little Samson - he died in the mutiny - even with Dumoulins. And others. Men I trusted to do the right thing. Corporal Barth. We would keep Ickx out of it, until I had your surrender supported by my personal word. Then I could argue with him. My personal honour would be at stake. It would ensure me of the Emperor's support: he likes his officers to be honourable."

Stephen looked at him as though struggling to understand. "You did not argue with him because you were unsure of Bonaparte's support?" He understood perfectly what else des Sablières was saying: it is your fault. We were after you. They died because of you. And he was right.

Was that what he had meant? And was it true? "I am just one Captain of Hussars," he tried to expalin, "and as such of course I can count on the Emperor's support. That is why..." Maturin would not listen to any explainations of loyalty and Raoul tryiing to order his own thoughts said. "I was told to do what Ickx ordered, and that was to pursue you and retrieve the papers. I have said what Ickx was like. I did not ... I did not argue with him because I did not know where his authority lay."