Under guard in Lisbon

Following orders. Stephen could not bring himself to reply. He shook his head in disgust and began walking again in the direction of the Torre, not looking behind to see if des Sablières followed.

Raoul watched the doctor walk away, with a sense of loss, though he could not have said what he had lost. Not Maturin's friendship - he had never had that - only briefly a sense of understanding.

Maturin had accused him of being a coward. And he could not deny it. He had proved his courage in battle: that had been easy. And he had not been afraid of Ickx in any physical sense. Had he been sure of his ground, he could have stood it and faced down any threats. But for those few moments, when Ickx had said that he and St-Laurent would find out where the men who stole the papers had gone, he had stepped back, too shocked at the expression on Ickx's face to offer any protest. And he had returned to his men and the horses, and thought about what would happen when they caught up with the British.

Well, it was done, and he would not forget it, or the lesson it tried to teach him. Now, he could only deal with the aftermath, which included Maturin's contempt, and the men he was going to see. At least Maturin would not forget his promise to them, whatever he thought of their Captain. He rose and moved after Maturin - not to overtake him but to follow slightly behind him, out of his sight.

The rest of the walk was going to be excruciatingly uncomfortable, but at least he had plenty to occupy his mind, What on earth was he going to do with des Sablières? He could not be exchanged. He had said all this to an enemy, a man he knew to be involved with intelligence - why?

It was not stupidity or simplicity. Was it complacency? Would Maturin be eliminated before he had a chance to share what he had been told? Christ. He looked over his shoulder - the captain was a few steps behind him. Stephen glared at looked forward again, resisting the impulse to take his sword. The man was honourable if nothing else - he would not break his parole. Would he? He was unarmed, to Stephen's knowledge. And he was not dishonourable.

What else could it be? Had he become unhinged? One thing was certain - if he would tell all of this to an enemy, it could be assumed that he would be even more loquacious with a friend. Not with that colonel though; unless that had been a lie? But the friend was British after all; perhaps not unhinged. Was it planned? Was he being out-maneuvered? Or had the confession been genuine penitence? He wondered if des Sablières was a Catholic - a confession might do him good. He could not suggest it though - it would probably be taken as something akin to the confessor he had demanded for Dutourd. Which brought him back to his original paranoia.

Raoul saw the glare in Maturin's eyes, and within it a menace that made him fall back further. He had wanted to explain, but it had become tangled with loyalty to the Emperor, and his own despicable attempts to lift the blame for his own actions onto others. It had brought him nothing but more contempt.

Why had he thought that Maturin would listen and maybe even understand? The merest touch of that world - the world of spies and paper and secrets - had made Raoul feel - and be - dishonourable. Maturin lived in that world - was that why he should understand? Or was it just that he was an easy man to confide in? Doctors respected confidences. And there was something of the priest about him - a vague memory of confesions as a child stirred and disappeared.

Now, glimpsing that cold, threatening eye, he reassessed what he had said as being told not to a priest or doctor, but to an enemy. What had he said? Nothing, he thought, that Maturin would not have got from the papers he took from Raoul's saddlebags, or that St-Laurent had not already told him.

He let the distance between him and Maturin widen still further.

They walked on in silence for what seemed like an interminable time, Stephen struggling with his anger, fears and confusion - his distress was exacerbated by the fact that his leg was growing stuff again, and his breath was starting to come out in weary little huffs. Finally, after they had gone at little more than two thirds along their road, he gave up and sat down on the low wall, gently massaging the muscles around his injury. He looked up - des Sablières was a little way behind him, looking utterly morose. Well, so be it. Stephen did not envy him it, but it was a lesson the young man had to learn. He had learnt it himself in Ireland, when he was des Sablières' age; he remembered the horrors of that time with an almost physical pain. No, he did not envy him. He waited for him to walk past, and kept his face carefully blank.

The doctor had sat down again, and clearly his leg was troubling him. Equally clearly he did not intend to allow Raoul to resume the conversation from earlier. His face was forbidding, cold, blank. Raoul walked past, up the rise to a place where he could see the track curving down and then up again towards the Torre. Perhaps another quarter of an hour - or longer, if the doctor's leg was truly giving him trouble. Raoul stopped there, looking back towards Maturin.

Stephen's face was softening. The Frenchman walked past him, but des Sablières was now taking up only the periphery of Maturin's mind - the rest of it was in County Carlow, and Sean Carty was running and screaming, smashing his head again and again into a wall, and Stephen Maturin was watching, weeping, and thanking God it was not him. He looked up, blinking, and des Sablières was watching him, having stopped on the rise. Their eyes met, and Stephen sharply brought himself under control. He stood up, brushing the dust from the back of his coat in a frustrated gesture.

When he saw the doctor rise and start to walk again - no longer as easily as before - Raoul turned and began to descend the slope. The sight of the Torre gave him a new focus from his thoughts, turning away from his own problems to those of his men.

The message he had received from the hospital had suggested that all were stable - but what did that mean for Corbeille, whose miraculous recovery could have been interrupted? And Thierry. Thierry had stopped a ball meant for Raoul, fired by one of his own men as they broke their parole and fled into the woods. But the wound that would cost him his arm had been received in that first skirmish, when his Company had met with unexpected resistance from the handful of riflemen. Aucoin, and Moreau - who had resented the surrender, and would have been with the mutineers if he had not been wounded - and Broussard whose loyalty had kept him at the side of his particular friend. What could he do for any of them, without Maturin's help?

He paused on the track until he heard the sound of the doctor's footsteps and of the crutch, before moving on again.

The simple thing to do would be to ask, Stephen thought. He would never have thought des Sablières would have answered his questions about Ickx, and he had. He might answer, and were he to answer truthfully, it might put Stephen's mind at ease. If he was wrong, then he would look foolish, which in itself was not such a very useless thing. He waited until he was at the crest of the small rise, with the sun to his back. "Capitaine des Sablières!"

Raoul turned. Dr Maturin was looking down towards him. The sun behind him cast his face in darkness. He walked back up towards him. "Yes, doctor?" He bit back an offer of help. Maturin had not accepted it earlier, and he would not risk another cold rejection.

Stephen walked forward, careful to keep the Frenchman's face lit in the soft sunlight. "Why did you talk to me regarding this?"

Raoul blinked his eyes. The sun was not blinding, but it hid Maturin's face, and he could not see his expression. "Because there was no one else," he said, and then quickly added, "which does not explain "why", only "why you". I said I could not forget - that is the truth. I have sat in that room and gone over what happened, and I know what I did and what I did not do, and what I should have done. I have argued with myself - and always lost the argument."

He licked at his lips. "You think that that is how Bonapartists behave, evil men, torturers and cowards - and that because I am loyal to the Emperor, that is what I am. And for me, you may be right. But that is because I acted like a coward, not because I am a Bonapartist. And Ickx? I did not know him, but I would swear that his roots went far back, before Napoleon Bonaparte. That is the evil that must be eradicated from France."

Despite the sunlight, des Sablières' pupils were not pinpricks - dilation spoke of mental anguish, he remembered Jaime telling him with a grin, as he swept the pieces of straw they had been using to represent money towards him, and they did not change size as he spoke. Stephen, taking another step forward, began to let himself suspect that the Frenchman was telling the truth.

He looked at the captain. "Because there was no one else" - a young man, one from a privileged background and a family, with protective parents and a loving sister. He did not know loneliness. He sounded genuinely... He knew what he had done. He understood now, and he no longer hid from that understanding. He was not flinching from the name "coward" any more, and for all that Stephen could not forgive he knew that he was in need of forgiveness himself.

Stephen was a man who knew his own failings, who agonised over them in the dark hours. Cruelty was not one of them.

"Come along," he said, looking up at the Torre, turning so that his face was illuminated. "Your men will be missing their captain."

Something had happened. Raoul could not be certain what, but there was a change in the atmosphere between them. Maturin's face, no longer in shadow, did not show warmth or even understanding, but it no longer froze his blood. And as for himself, he had said what he had to say, and felt - not better, because what he had admitted to Maturin and to himself could not make him feel better - but ready to take another step, not forever treading over the same ground, like a dog turning a spit.

At Maturin's words, he turned towards the Torre, a square tower overlooking the mouth of the Tagus, now prison and hospital for the British forces. "Yes," he said, "They will be wondering what kept me." He waited until the doctor reached him so that they could again walk side by side.

Sablières waited for him now. "They will understand. You could not leave until you had pass and parole." Stephen took a swig from his canteen. "Are you sure you won't have a drop?"

"Thank you." Raoul took the canteen. His mouth had dried, almost as if he was afraid. And yet what was there to be scared of? As the doctor had said, he had his parole and a pass to visit his men in Belem. He drank, holding the water in his mouth for a moment before swallowing. He handed it back.

"I should tell them what will become of them, but I think that no one can say at present. But I must speak to Thierry. It is for me to tell him..." He looked back towards the Torre. "There is no sense in delaying it. You are giving enough of your time to a group of troublesome prisoners."

"I promised that I would - I have made the time. When we go in, I will give you some time to tell him, then. Will you stay with him during the operation?"

"Thank you. I will stay, of course. And I must see the others. Broussard too, if they will allow it." He looked up at the Torre. It was of course a hospital for the British, and his men were there only for convenience. It was convenient also that there was a prison within the same walls, to which they could be transferred when they had recovered from their wounds. With its thick, fortified walls it looked more suited to its use as a prison.

"You will wish to speak to the doctor here, to make arrangements... and I should know how they are. And then I must see them." He drew a deep breath. "I can at least assure them that they will be treated honourably."

The entrance to the Torre was through a guarded gateway into a fortified courtyard, like an old castle. Raoul was conscious that the sentries were regarding him with more that mild suspicion, and was glad that the doctor was with him, to confirm the permission he had to visit his men. He touched the papers in his pocket: pass and parole.

"Of course. McGrigor told me a surgeon by the name of Whiting is a charge - a highly capable, respectable man. There will be no trouble."

One of the sentries approached them. "Excuse me, sir, but what business do you have here?"

"I am Doctor Maturin, to see Mr Whiting." He held out a note with McGrigor's signature on it - he had never visited Belem, and had hoped he would be stopped when he was not recognised. "And this is Captain des Sablières."

Raoul produced his own piece of paper with Captain Padstowe's signature. The sentry took both, and stepped back into the guardhouse - presumably to consult someone. Perhaps he could not even read.

"You might have had less trouble without me," he said softly, "but this is not the uniform I would have chosen for a clandestine inflitration." McGrigor presumably had authority in the hospital here; but what authority did Captain Padstowe hold?

"Tush, it is no trouble. Considering some of the people it holds, and people it is trying to keep out, I am glad that there is some security. Your parole is in order - do you know who signed the pass?"

"Captain Padstowe - he wrote it out when I asked him for one. But they had already been told I might come, I believe, so it will be more in the form of an introduction." The other sentries had not yet relaxed.

"I think, if I remain in Lisbon, I must buy some civilian clothes. I was conscious of suspicion, which I understand, of course, but it is uncomfortable. Someone wll recognize this uniform and take the law into their own hands, before I can produce my parole." Or they will be unable to read it - even the peasants working in the fields they had passed had raised their heads to watch him.

A sergeant had appeared in the door and looking from a leather book to them. The sentry handed both passes to Maturin, and stood back smartly.

"I think that would be a wise precaution. Thank you," Stephen said to the sentry. He looked up at des Sablières - for the first time in their walk he looked concerned. "When did you see Captain Padstowe?"

"Captain Padstowe? He came to make sure I was settled in - and to tell me of my parole, and then again yesterday. He brought my Lord Edrington to see me - I told you that - and after milord had gone, the Captain returned and wrote out the pass." Raoul looked puzzled. "We did not talk at all."

"At about what time? Afternoon? Evening?" When Stephen had arrived at Padstowe's lodgings at ten past ten the night before, he had not been there - he had waited for an hour, drinking tea and wishing for coffee, and then he had gone to Headquarters - no sign of him since much earlier in the day. He had even gone to find Sharpe, who had no idea of where Padstowe might be. Back to Padstowe's lodgings for another anxious wait, and then to his own in the early hours of the morning. He was not overly worried - he had gone to Headquarters first thing in the morning and there had been no mention of any attack or fight, and everyone was too busy arranging the march to give any thought to captain who had missed an unofficial rendez-vous. If he had got drunk, Stephen thought, the sorrows of Munster would not compare to those of Jonathan Padstowe.